Prefect Thought for the Week #5

Prefect Thought for the Week #5 – Serena Brown

School serena brown Mr Hodson October 12, 2017 0 Comments

Good morning school.

I wanted to use my time this morning to try and make everyone appreciate themselves a little more. The talk at the scholar’s dinner last Thursday, on astrophysics and the universe, left me feeling rather small and insignificant. I’ll try to do this with the slightly paradoxical idea, that the only thing we all truly have in common is the fact we are all completely unique. I intend to do this with some simple maths and biology Mr Hockeridge caught my imagination with recently in a lesson. I know it’s first thing on a Monday morning of week 6, but try and stay with me and put into perspective your individuality with a more accurate number to correct that old adage of ‘you’re one in a million’.

So, for our calculations we use the world population projections for 2016, using cross section of both males and females, between the fertile ages of 15-39 to cover all possibilities as an average.

This gives us a total female population of fertile age at 1,450,839,609 (one billion four hundred fifty million eight hundred thirty-nine thousand six hundred nine)

And a total fertile male population of 1,382,990,631 (one billion three hundred eighty-two million nine hundred ninety thousand six hundred thirty-one)

Then by removing 25% which is the World health organisations estimate that ¼ couples experience infertility and times the two figures together we get the total number of possible couples of a male and a female which is:

1.13 X 10^18 which is roughly 13 with 17 0’s on the end. Which is a very large figure!